Lake

Mathias Svalina

I had cut my hand off on the bandsaw. It was sitting there on the workbench. I almost fainted, but when I didn’t I wrapped a rag around my hand, my stump and called 911. I picked up my hand and exited the garage. Since I could still faint, I wanted to be where the ambulance would see me.

I sat on the curb. I held my severed hand in my unsevered hand. It looked like a joke.

A woman walked up to me with a baby in her arms. I expected her to ask me if I needed help so I told her that I’d called 911 already. The blood had turned my jeans black and heavy.

The woman handed me the baby. It was all so abrupt that I dropped my severed hand so I could take the baby. She turned and walked to a blue Dodge Comet and got in and drove away. My rag had loosened on my arm, my stump, and the blood was really coming out again. It got all over the baby. I could hear the sirens approaching through the neighborhood. The baby began crying.

When the ambulance turned the corner I was starting to lose it. The day seemed like it was coming to me through a thick shield of translucent glass. The EMT came up to me and I handed him the baby. The baby was covered in blood. Things looked bad.

“What’s wrong with the baby?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not my baby.”

“Whose baby is it?” the EMT asked.

“Some lady,” I said. “She drove away.”

The EMT took the baby back to the ambulance. I waited for my turn. It seemed rude to cut in front of a baby.

Then the ambulance engine started, and the ambulance drove down my cul-de-sac to turn around and head back toward the hospital. As it passed me the driver gave me a thumbs up. I held up my bleeding stump in a kind of salute to him.

I called 911 again, since the baby stole my ambulance. My hand was in the dirt on the street. I picked it up and tried to get the dirt off the bloody part by rubbing it against my jeans.

The blue Dodge Comet drove up and stopped in front of me, idling. The woman leaned over and rolled down the window. It had one of those old turny window cranks and her body moved rhythmically as she turned it.

“Where’s the baby?” the woman asked me through the window.

“The ambulance came and took it,” I said. “I cut my hand off,” I added.

“Well,” the woman said, “I need that baby back. I never should have given it to you.” She was smoking a cigarette and she flicked the butt out the window. When it hit the asphalt it rolled to me and I stamped it out with my shoe.

I fainted then. When I came to the woman was sitting next to me. The car was in front of us still, still idling. She was holding my hand in one hand and shaking me with the other.

“I’m going to take this,” the woman said.

“No!” I said. “It’s mine. I need that hand to put back on my arm.”

“I gave you the baby. It’s an even trade,” she said.

“But the ambulance guys took the baby,” I said.

“Well, that’s on you,” she said.

Then I fainted again and woke up in an ambulance. The EMT guys were different guys, which seemed weird to me at the time. One of them was even a woman.

“Where’s my hand?” I asked the woman EMT.

“It got cut off,” she said.

“Yes, but the woman took it,” I said. “Where is the woman?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “Now lie back down. You’re losing a lot of blood.”

I laid back on the gurney. I couldn’t feel my hand. But beyond that I couldn’t feel anything. Later I would understand that they’d given me some drugs, but right then I assumed I was dying.

“I’m dying,” I told the woman EMT. She had a package of gauze in her mouth and she grunted something that was not a word in response.

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Mathias Svalina is the author of one book of poems, Destruction Myth, & one book of prose, I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur. With Zachary Schomburg & Alisa Heinzman he co-edits Octopus Books.